Maritime Gothic

Phaedra “Fade” Luck wakes up under a gravestone to a series of urgent text messages from her mother, Doreen. Her aunt, Madeline, has gone missing. “You’re the only one besides me who knows the way to her house, Phaedra,” one reads. “And you’re probably the only person she would let in. Including me. Because she’s that stubborn. You have to go.”

The thirty-three-year-old pilots her car to Willow Sound on the North Shore of Nova Scotia and navigates through the “deep dark woods” to her aunt’s house. What she finds doesn’t quite match her memory. The cottage that seemed tiny to her as a child —“tidy and bright” with a purple front door and “stained glass windows glowing violet and orange, as if it was always sunset inside her house”— now stands in ruin, like a “nightmare.”

As Fade explores the seemingly vacant house, she comes across artifacts that only add to the mystery. Among them are paper scrolls, “apothecary bottles brimming with liquids to heal and...